Walmart is selling 10.1", Atom N270, 250 gb hard drive, 1 gb ram, Windows 7 Starter netbooks for just $228 this week. I expected them to be sold out when I got there at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning (day after Christmas) but they had 7 that I could see in the locked case; and on-line one Walmart department manager volunteered that although Walmart promised to have a minimum of 10 at each store, his store received 76. So while your mileage may vary, if this deal interests you, you should visit your local Wally World. BTW there was no sign or in-store advertising to hype the deal – these weren't out on pallets blocking the aisle, the way they sell their desktop bargains.
This is an eMachines, which would have stunk in the past, but now it's just one of the three labels Acer sells under – Gateway is their posh brand, Acer their middle, and eMachines their…Walmart brand. But they are all made the same out of the same basic parts, which is to say Acer has tons of variants (160 gb, 250 gb, 10.1", 11.6", draft g or draft n wireless, 1gb or 2gb, N270 chipset or N280). I don't see any quality of build difference between the one I picked up and my Acer netbook. The N270 chip, btw, is about 5% slower than the N280, so for practical purposes, no difference; most netbooks have the N270, so buying a more expensive netbook won't necessarily get you the slightly faster N280 Atom version.
A big plus is the fact that this comes with Windows 7 Starter and not XP or Vista. Starter is GREAT a modern operating system that promises the "leanness" that Linux promises, but Starter actually delivers and of course also has great driver and peripheral support which is sometimes lacking in Linux, even Ubuntu (XP is second, but in the next year will probably be a bit of a relic; Vista is a dog). I find my netbooks running 7 Starter to be as quick as my XP ones, and both much snappier than any Vista version.
1gb is "enough" if you are on a tight budget, but if you run your browser full screen (hit F11) to maximize your screen view, and then open tabs, it will start to noticeably slow down (noticeable when you try to scroll) – something it stopped doing once I replaced the 1gb memory module with a 2 gb module (a mere 3 minutes effort). I also noted that VLC will play the DVD's I converted to h.264 code (via Handbrake, both programs free from their homepages) fine with 1gb, but Apple's Quicktime could only play them when I increased the memory to 2gb.
250gb for the harddrive is a really great feature; the $359 (Costco) HPMini 110 only has a 160 gb harddrive, in comparison.
The battery is only a 3 cell, good for 3 hours, the 6 cell batteries on a lot of other netbooks are good for 6 hours. But 3 hours is probably enough for me – longer than that, and I start looking for outlets (at the airport, for example).
Note: On January 4, Intel's embargo on the latest, greatest netbooks with the Atom 450 chip go on sale for the same price as "regular" Atom 270/280 chips. The new chips are only 10%-20% faster (although that might mean the difference between normal and higher rez Hulu), but more importantly they are much more efficient in terms of power usage. So unless you get a GREAT deal on a netbook like this Walmart eMachine, wait until January 4 to do your netbook shopping.
